Provincial interim firefighter training program coming soon, minister says

CITYnews halifax / By Natasha O’Neill

After an absolutely damning audit in the summer found that firefighters’ safety was at risk in training programs, the province is setting up its own in the next few months.

Kim Masland, Minister of Emergency Management, said on The Todd Veinotte Show that after cutting ties with the Nova Scotia Firefighters School in August, the government is introducing an interim option for crews.

“We’re putting together an interim training program for firefighters, while we’ll continue to work on a long-term comprehensive training model,” she said. “And we want to make sure that our firefighters, who are putting their lives on the line to protect others every day, they deserve certainly a safe environment for training.”

Masland said that the program is not up and running yet, but she hopes it will be by the end of this fall.

This follows a comprehensive money-for-value audit that detailed several failures of the firefighters’ school — which currently operates as a non-profit body — to keep students safe and to run the organization, giving firefighters a good foundation for their careers.

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The audit included more than 680 firefighters from across the province, 52 fire service leaders, and eight members of the board of directors. The report released Aug. 5, was in response to pushback after a student, Skyler Blackie, 28, was critically injured and later died in 2019 after a fire extinguisher he was using exploded during an exercise.

As of right now, officials can be trained within fire departments across the province, and many offer training regionally. When the program is operational, Marsland said the goal is to have a regional hub for it so firefighters don’t have to travel far.

To date the province have set up a committee to lead the program, including Mark Bettens, Chief Director of the Cape Breton Regional Fire Service, and Paul Maynard, Director of Client Services with the province.

“Our value for our debt money was done in August, and we haven’t wasted any time on this at all,” Marsland said. “We absolutely know, and we are committed to our firefighters out there to ensure they have a safe place to train. They deserve that.”

The minister did not disclose a cost for the training.